The Airborne Toxic Event rose to notoriety in near-record time: Hometown station KROQ began spinning the L.A. band’s first single, “Sometime Around Midnight,” in January, three weeks after the unsigned quintet finished recording it at a friend’s house.

But frontman Mikel Jollett, 34, and guitarist Steven Chen, 30, of the band— which plays the Blank Club on Wednesday — put in years of struggle first. In the literary world, not the musical one.

After Chen graduated from the University of California-Berkeley in 2000, a mutual friend suggested he speak to Jollett, a 1996 Stanford alum, for advice on making it as a writer in San Francisco. At the time, Jollett didn’t even know Chen played guitar, and Jollett “had no ambition to be a musician, none whatsoever.

“I wanted to be a writer. And then this whole music thing just happened. It’s a little absurd.”

In 2006, after years of scuffling, Jollett finally was getting somewhere. He had secured an agent for his in-progress debut novel and been invited to the prestigious Yaddo artist colony in upstate New York, following in the footsteps of such luminaries as Saul Bellow and William Carlos Williams.

But as he embarked on the final push to finish his novel in his L.A. apartment, Jollett received a devastating flurry of bad news: the end of a relationship, a cancer diagnosis for his mother and a diagnosis of a genetic autoimmune syndrome for himself.

Jollett responded by singing and playing guitar for hours, every day. He had toyed with writing songs as a young man, but this experience was entirely different.

“When you’re young and you write songs, you either go into melodrama, or there’s a certain posturing that goes on because you want to look a certain way,” he says. “I just suddenly didn’t care about any of that, and I would write what actually felt real to me.”

For months and months, he poured out his heart in song to an audience of one: his neighbor’s cat.

“When I looked up a year later, I’d written maybe 100 songs and maybe 10 pages of the book,” he says. “So I was like, ‘Well, I guess this is what I want to do.’ “

To the shock of his family and friends, he declined the invitation to Yaddo, put the novel on hold and — with new drummer friend Daren Taylor — went about launching a band, named after a term in Don DeLillo’s novel “White Noise.” They invited Chen to add a few keyboard parts and ended up with a lead guitarist. Jazz-trained bassist Noah Harmon and keyboardist, violinist and violist Anna Bulbrook completed the lineup.

Neither Jollett nor Chen had much experience. Jollett had played a little garage rock with some Foothill College students while he was at Stanford University. Chen’s public musical résumé consisted of two gigs with a San Francisco band in which everyone else spoke Italian.

So when KROQ got behind the band, and record label reps started flocking to its residency at L.A.’s Spaceland nightclub, it was all uncharted territory.

“That was a really cool and weird experience,” Chen says. “You kind of decide at some point you’re not going to try to get into the head space of how weird everything is, because everything’s just weird after a certain point.”

Not surprisingly, there was a backlash. When the band’s eponymous CD came out in August, Pitchfork Media, the online arbiter of indie-rock hipness, gave it a scathing 1.6-out-of-10 review, dismissing it as a calculated effort to target its readers’ wallets by using tricks stolen from Bright Eyes and the Arcade Fire.

“I love the Arcade Fire, but I don’t think we sound anything like them,” Jollett says. “I think we’re way darker, more like the Jesus and Mary Chain with a string section. That’s what I was going for.”

Though Jollett and Chen were new to the music game, both knew a thing or two about rock journalism. The band responded to the negative review by posting “An Open Letter to Pitchfork Media,” in which the members praised the critic’s tenacity and commitment while calmly rebutting his assumptions about the band.

“We felt that it was important not to let them have the last say,” Chen says.

“Sometime Around Midnight” — a moody epic about seeing an ex at a nightclub — continues to open doors for the band. This month the song was named iTunes’ alternative song of the year.

But the band isn’t resting on its laurels. It just finished a grueling round of 30 shows in 30 days in the United Kingdom. And when the Airborne Toxic Event gets on stage, as it will for the KCNL “Channel 104.9” holiday show Wednesday at the Blank Club, members of the band give it their all.

“The idea of staring at your feet while you play chords and wear your checkered shirt — that whole idea is stupid,” Jollett says. “We’re very much a rock ‘n’ roll band, and we scream and jump and sweat.”

After years of grappling with prose in solitude, Chen says he is learning to appreciate the rock life. “There’s something more communal in the experience of playing a live show,” he says. “You’re bringing everyone else along with you.”

Jollett hopes he’ll have a chance to wrap up his novel — about terminally ill young adults living life to the fullest (“it’s supposed to be funny,” he says) — before the band’s second CD comes out.

“It’d be cool to finish the record and have a few months before the release to really just disappear and work on the book, but I don’t know,” he says. “I’m new to this whole thing.”

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